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How does the project align with your institution’s priorities and needs?

Why did you choose the outcome and library factor as areas to examine?

Why was the team composition appropriate?

The “Collaborating to Build an Assessment Infrastructure” project of the Ingram Library at the University of West Georgia (UWG) has been undertaken in support of a campus-wide movement toward “data-informed” decision making. The UWG AiA project is an attempt to correlate student outcomes via enrollment data to the following library service and resource usages:

This data, particularly on a longitudinal scale, will provide a broad survey of specific library usage rates and their correlation with student success.

What are the significant contributions of your project?

What was learned about assessing the library’s impact on student learning and success?

What was learned about creating or contributing to a culture of assessment on campus?

What, if any, are the significant findings of your project?

It is hoped that the “Collaborating to Build an Assessment Infrastructure” project will provide an example of how to create an infrastructure to collect data on individual student usage of specific library resources and parse it with anonymized enrollment/grade data to draw correlations to student outcomes. This reported data would be linked with a persistent, unique, non-identifying alternate ID number in order to create a longitudinal data set.

We received institutional support from key university offices most notably, the Office of Institutional Effectiveness & Assessment as well as from campus IT and consortium IT. However, and in spite of this support, a key finding for our project members was that, particularly given the ambitious scope of our project, it can easily take more than a year to create a comprehensive assessment infrastructure.

What will you change as a result of what you learned (– e.g., institutional activities, library functions or practices, personal/professional practice, other)?

How does this project contribute to current, past, or future assessment activities on your campus?

As a result of participation in AiA, our library has instituted a number of procedures that will continue as they are now part of an ongoing assessment practice. Using swipe card readers purchased for the project we will continue logging student interactions with library faculty and staff at the reference and circulation desks and logging student participation in library research workshops.

By parsing enrollment/grade data with the longitudinal collection of student library use we will have a much more granular account of how student success correlates with the services and resources provided by the library. Collecting this data on an ongoing basis will harmonize the analysis of library effectiveness in a manner more consistent with measurements being used by other campus programs and departments.